Menu

Housing Innovation via the Maker Movement

DD Review: CerebReal

BookletChloe and I spoke to two individuals on Monday at our review: Ansgar Killing and Kate Richter. Their advice was both supportive and directional and I think that their tips will push our project to a complete level, ready for final review.

Ansgar’s comments consisted of:

Ensuring that we make our big move prominent and impactful. To do so, one way we could accomplish this is by raising our punched mechanical return shaft and having it be read across the entire facade.
Another piece of advice he had was to double the glazed punch as a solar chimney to help exhaust the fumes and air that would be coming primarily from the maker spaces below. This would become a series of detail and wall section changes but would not heavily change our design, just strengthen the use of the punch.
He also recommended that there be a single prominent entrance since we currently have two entrances, one on 3rd and one on Illinois. By having just one, we would be able to keep the building to “one address” and avoid confusion.
When critiquing the idea of our storage core, he suggested that we lighten up the walls of storage and create a storage floor in order to maximize storage capacity.
Lastly, he recommended that for our precedents, we show prototypical mechanical systems and existing ones that we have ideated from in order to ground our ideas of the conveyance mechanism.

Kate’s comments consisted of:

Making adjustments in the facade to make for more variation and not fall into the monotonous vertical meter where it is right now. This could be done by incrementally adjusted angles or depths of the same module that aggregate to larger gestures that speak with the punch. She gave us a great precedent to look at: One Oak by Snohetta
She also was helpful in suggesting representational changes and tweaks like updating and enlarging our exploded axonometric. She also suggested sizing up our sections and keep our plans detailed but at the same 1/32 scale.
One plan specific comment she had was that the bridges which are so prominent in design didn’t explicitly show up in all of our drawings and in order to really drive home this incredible system, we should show it in each view so there is a constant understanding of the relationship between the system and space throughout the building.

As a result of this advice we are choosing to pursue bits and pieces. Moving forward, we will be turning our mechanical punch out on 3rd street into a solar chimney that will be occupied by the mechanical space and in part by people on residential levels. While we will keep both entrances, this protrusion will mark our primary entrance from third street and our rear entrance from Illinois and Crane Cove Park will remain but be subdued as a soft entrance and extension of the park. We also will be expanding our amount of storage by flooding it into one of the floors to allow for large item storage but maintain the cabinetry feel of the core as a whole. We also will be sure to include precedents more explicitly spelled out for our ideas, particularly the conveyance system, for the final poster in order to get the audience into our frame of mind. We will also be heeding Kate’s diagrammatic advice and will raise emphasis put on the exploded axon and hybridize the axon sequencing with the flip book diagrams that we have made in order to tell a story of our project development and list a recipe of parts to show how we have gotten to where we will be. We will also be occupying our plans and sections with the mechanical system more explicitly in place and with people to enhance the understanding of how the two systems work coherently to make CerebReal a place of thinking, making, and innovation.